HIGHEST VOTE COUNTS EVER

As you'd probably expect, it's the statewide offices (with the highest number of voters) that lead the highest-vote counts in California history. Of these statewide offices, it's most often the federal offices (and particularly in Presidential election years) that receive the highest numbers of votes.

2020 - Joe Biden for President - 11.11 million
2016 - Hillary Clinton for President - 8.75 million votes
2008 - Barack Obama for President - 8.27 million
2018 - Betty Yee for Controller - 8.01 million
2018 - Alex Padilla for Secretary of State - 7.91 million
2012 - Dianne Feinstein for Senate - 7.86 million
2012 - Barack Obama for President - 7.85 million
2018 - Fiona Ma for Treasurer - 7.83 million
2018 - Xavier Becerra for Attorney General - 7.79 million
2018 - Gavin Newsom for Governor - 7.72 million

CANDIDATES WITH THE HIGHEST VOTE COUNTS

Another way to evaluate the relative successes of candidates is to compare the total vote counts they receive. The following is a list of the most popular candidates from each of four categories (the statewide category excludes US Senate and the Presidential candidates). The all-time highest vote counts received by a candidate in California in a single election was;

WINNING CANDIDATES WITH THE LOWEST VOTE COUNTS
It can also be interesting to see what the lowest votre requirements for a certain office might be. It takes a combination of factors to reach some of these numbers, as in the case of Assemblyman Fuentes, who got just over 50% of the votes in an election with low turn-out (10.24%) in an Assembly district with the second lowest voter registration rates in the state (only AD-46 had fewer voters).